What do we think of applications that scan food and cosmetic products?

You may have already witnessed this phenomenon, or perhaps you are already a fan yourself: a consumer grabs a product from the shelf, scans it with their smartphone, then puts it back or adds it to their cart. In the era of everything connected, and no offense to the most technophobic, our smartphones assist us in all daily tasks, including even our shopping. In this case, these consumers use applications that scan their food and cosmetic products in order to clearly indicate to them, using a note and a color code, whether they are healthy and which potentially harmful substances harmful substances they may contain.

A beneficial initiative for many French people who no longer do their shopping without their scanners. But be careful not to fall into orthorexia, this tendency to want to consume healthy products which turns into an obsession for some. Because although these applications can represent a fantastic tool, they should not end up replacing any critical sense on our side!

What are these applications that tell us about the composition of products?

Who hasn’t already found themselves faced with a list of ingredients and additives as long as an arm on the label on the back of a product that they were about to put in their shopping cart? While it is important to be wary of what industrial products contain, where even the most basic and apparently healthy ones can contain questionable components, it is difficult to make informed choices when the list of ingredients is as intelligible to us as a stele covered with hieroglyphs. The Nutri-score is a good indicator, but it does not tell us everything the product contains in detail.

To be able to make more informed choices, many applications offer to scan your products directly in the supermarket. Nothing could be simpler: just open your application and pass your smartphone camera in front of the item’s barcode so that the application displays a score or color code, indicating that a product is more or less “good” or “bad” (sometimes directly its Nutri-score, by the way) and/or a list of ingredients and undesirable substances.

The best known and most used of these applications is Yuka, which lists food, cosmetics and hygiene products, but there are many others created by start-ups who have tapped into this vein, or major retail brands who see it as a way to gain consumer trust. We can also mention that the consumer rights association UFC-Que Choisir launched its own application called Which product. Some applications also take into account your allergens or your diet, while others consider societal or environmental criteria. Today, no less than one in four French people use one of these applications when doing their shopping. These are also free apps ; It is therefore tempting to download them and get into the habit of shopping.

What is the point of applications that scan food products?

The interest is obviously to better control the substances that we ingest or apply to our body. Because as we have said, the Nutri-score, for example, only gives us a vague idea of ​​the quality of a product. Above all, it is relative: some products are healthier than others; this means that the same note, for a yogurt or oil, is also relative. And moreover, it only measures the nutritional value of a product; gold, a product with good nutritional value may contain harmful substances Moreover. These applications are much more precise, since they list the ingredients present in these products and assign a rating to each of them (“high risk”, “moderate” or “low” at Yuka, for example).

Like the Nutri-score which has pushed many manufacturers to change the composition of their products with the lowest scores, these apps put similar pressure on manufacturers ; because a third of users would put an item that does not meet their expectations back on the shelf to turn to an alternative perceived as healthier. In fact, manufacturers have every interest in changing the composition to make it more attractive…and therefore healthier.

Can we trust these applications that scan food products?

Applications that allow us to finally understand the industrial gibberish that appears on the back of our products, to determine which ones contain more or less harmful substances, and which exert pressure on the sectors concerned to improve the quality of their products? But what are we waiting for?

Although this sounds like a dream, you still have to be a little wary when using it. You shouldn’t just scan by adding all the “good” products to your cart and eliminating all the “bad” ones. Remember that the objective, with regard to diet, is to have a balanced one: we can perfectly fill our shopping cart with highly rated products without them meeting all of our nutritional needs! You can also treat yourself and consume certain poorly rated products: it is not by consuming a potentially carcinogenic substance once that you will develop a tumor.

As with the Nutri-score, not all products are created equal. As nutritionist Laurence Plumey points out for thank you for the info, cheese is salty and contains saturated fat: suffice to say that for these applications, it is a no. However, it has its place within a balanced diet. To take another rather telling example, the jam is poorly rated because it is considered too sweet – no joke! And in the same vein, when it comes to cosmetics, a product does not interact in the same way with our body depending on whether we apply it and rinse it or leave it on our skin all day: However, in the eyes of these applications, it is the same thing. A product, or an ingredient, is judged good or bad, without take into consideration how it will be consumed.

Ultimately, the idea is not to categorize this or that product as good or harmful, but to understand why this choice was made. We can also mention that some of these applications, such as QuelProduit, give more detailed results, differentiating the results according to consumer profiles – certain products are therefore judged to be good for an average adult, but harmful for an infant or a child. pregnant woman. We would therefore advise you to turn to applications that adapt their results to your profile.

We must also keep in mind that each of these applications has its own criteria for evaluating a substance or product. To take the example of Yuka, since it is the most used of them, its scale for a food product is as follows: 60% of the score corresponds to its nutritional quality, 30% to the presence of additives, and 10% to its biological dimension. In addition, whether it is food or cosmetics, the application applies a precautionary principle, which means that any substance presenting “any risk, even supposed” will negatively affect the rating. ‘a product. If we can subscribe to such a method, certainly prudent, it is still wise to inform users, who otherwise risk flinching when seeing the number of components discarded by the application. Moreover, many of these applications do not bother with details and do not specify why the analysis is negative : presence of endocrine disruptors, irritants, environmental toxicity? It all ends up in the same basket — and not your shopping basket.

In short, before blindly relying on the opinion of its application, you must be aware that it was designed by a company having established a subjective scale : why, for example, did you choose to make 30% of a product’s rating dependent on the presence of additives at Yuka? Same for the ten percent granted to organic? The company claims to have established that this scale was the most relevant after consulting a panel of consumers as well as nutritionists – it nonetheless remains subjective. So before scanning the supermarket shelves all the time, scan the criteria on which an application is based to produce its results, in order to choose the one that best meets your expectations.

But far from us from wanting to dissuade you from using such applications, which have certain usefulness and seem to push manufacturers to design healthier products. Despite the fact that we must therefore remain cautious and not stupidly rely on the advice of an application when doing our shopping – in the end, it is up to us to make our own informed choices, and for that to seek information from the opportunity on the why and how of the qualification as “good” or “bad” of this or that substance — it is undeniable that it is a tool of choice in the consumer’s arsenal. Now it’s up to us to use it intelligently! Because that’s all that remains: a tool, which should not prevent us from using our critical sense elsewhere, from educating ourselves, from analyzing!